I am watching Anvil! The Story of Anvil, and it is breaking my heart.

just saw this, pretty undeniable stuff. personal lol for me that the town their hapless manager got them stuck in is my hometown (know the feeling guys...!). i also liked the score in this, think i'll check out some David Torn

I got on a plane the other day intending to make a big dent in the book I'm reading, which is "The New Confessions" by William Boyd, about a guy who relentlessly pursues a single artistic vision throughout his entire life. Instead I watch Anvil The Story of Anvil which is about the exact same thing. I loved it and had a pretty strong emotional response to it. Gonna recommend it to everyone I know.

i've watched tons of movies and read tons of books about bands whose music i didn't know well, so i know that wasn't the problem, but really this movie didn't move or entertain me at all. just kinda dull, don't see the big deal about it.

¯\(°_o)/¯ don't know what to tell you guys...the Japan scene was nice, I guess, but honestly I'm a pretty big sap, doesn't take much to make me feel something but I just did not get much out of this flick.

The scene that got me was when they were fighting during the recording session and Lips was all, "Who else am I going to blow up at? You're all I got!" and his bottom lip was quivering as the tears welled up.

If you can get through the very extended interview with Lars Ulrich in the DVD Special Features, the director gets extremely choked up at the end and exposes his utter fanboy relationship with the band, which is touching in itself.

I can't believe I only just got around to seeing this. I'm not especially a metal fan, although I like some, but that's irrelevant, this is like Some Kind of Monster where the individuals are likeable crossed with Spinal Tap. Its really engaging and bighearted.

Yeah, I dunno. Their music's fine, but it's not terribly interesting. Compared to the artistic advances their peers were making in the mid to late eighties they seem to have always just been chugging along to the same groove.

I adore this movie, but did indeed miss an honest opinion about the quality of Anvil's music. Their third album was released in 1983, was killer, and ahead of the game. For some reason it took the band 4 years to follow it up. In those 4 years metal expanded considerably. Trash metal happened, death metal, doom metal... hardcore and metal got mixed, funk became part of the equation, etc. When Anvil dropped their new album, they sounded very old fashioned. What also didn't help was that every Anvil album had one or two overly poppy songs and that their new album was now made up almost exclusively of these. I think that this is what damaged the band's career. Not bad luck or what have you. Just bad management. All the follow-up albums are also mediocre at best. It is nice, but not nice enough, and definitely not as good and special as their first three albums were. I wish these guys all the success in the world, they are sweet and lovely, but once the documentary becomes old news, they have to keep the momentum with the quality of their new releases. I seriously wonder if they are able to pull that off.

Yeah, I dunno. Their music's fine, but it's not terribly interesting. Compared to the artistic advances their peers were making in the mid to late eighties they seem to have always just been chugging along to the same groove.

in context I think he meant the production of the albums, but I'm sure he was probably also talking about the songs, because in recent interviews he's said ultimately the production doesn't matter if your songs are shit.

he even admitted in an interview recently that the fans mostly come to shows for the first three albums, and that they base their setlists on that and just cherrypick the rest of the setlist based on their newer material. I wouldn't be surprised if the comments on those late-80s/mid-90s albums were "don't remember it", "oh, that one", "hmm I remember one of those songs".

he also confirmed that they no longer have regular jobs, that Anvil provides all their income now, so apparently the post-movie bump has maintained itself, though I will say they played to very small crowds both times I saw them. but Lips looked like a toothy grinning kid who just picked up a guitar for the first time, it's impossible not to enjoy that.

I don't know how anyone thought this film could be a hoax. There was plenty of evidence the band existed on the internet with lots of fan discussion and it would have been an incredible feat to fake all that old footage with the band looking much younger and get actors who were that convincing.

One of my favourite parts is when Lips goes around the metal bands looking to talk about old times. One guy has a good story and another guy doesn't remember him at all.

yeah, Vinnie Appice looked mortified but it was cool seeing Lips still be a fanboy at his age. Glad they didn't selectively edit that sequence for melodrama, they could have gone one or two ways with it, ie, purposefully only showing the "wtf" reactions of the other musicians, or the opposite, just showing the Twisted Sister/Motorhead meetups.

I also think it's a little weird that in all of the Motorhead/Lemmy soundbites it never got mentioned that Lemmy asked Lips to replace Fast Eddie Clarke in Motorhead, and Lips declined. kind of a big detail!

I do wonder how many bands are in Anvil's situation before the film. I mean there are hundreds of great bands who never were able to give up the day job but I don't know how unusual it is to have to go back to your day job after diminished success and keep releasing albums that long.

I think many old metal musicians avoid this because they subsidize their livelihood by playing in/touring with multiple bands at a time. lots of long-standing metal bands would ostensibly lose members over time, so you'd see people like Sharlee d'Angelo, an otherwise unexceptional bass player, filling these roles and cashing in by being a part of an already established act (I think one year he played on like five albums I bought). I think even Dave Lombardo admitted to joining Testament for the paycheck in the late 90s. And then there was Savatage, who, ok, were on Atlantic for years, which helped, but managed to help create a spinoff band (Trans-Siberian Orchestra) that was lucrative.

not that this was a road to riches, mind you, but if you're getting touring/merchandise incomes, possibly even a songwriting credit or two from more than one act, you have a better chance of staying afloat and not having to work a day job.

but someone like Lips would never be into that - Anvil is really an extension of him (hell, the band was originally named after him).

got Juggernaut of Justice last night and really like it. As far as their post-movie albums, This is Thirteen and Juggernaut are the best, but the newish one, Hope in Hell, is a bit of a dropoff. There's tunes on it for sure but nothing like on the previous two.